Globalization Dot: Reading List

Two years ago i was part of a great book group that read only books on Globalization for a year. Since Globalization is definitely one of the dots I'm trying to connect, I might was well start with the list of books we read on the topic (and a few I read before).

• World on Fire. Amy Chua
• Globalization and Its Discontents. Joseph Stiglitz
• The Future of Freedom. Fareed Zakaria
• Empire. Niall Ferguson
• The Poisonwood Bible. Barbara Kingsolver [or you could read King Leopold's Ghost if you prefer non-fiction. Things Fall Apart would be another great fiction book to add to this list.]
• The Lexus and the Olive Tree. Thomas Friedman (dull, I'd skip it)
• Life and Debt (film)
• Tropical Gangsters. Robert Klitgaard.
• Guns, Germs and Steel. Jared Diamond
• Jihad vs. McWorld. Benjamin Barber

See also Memoirs of an Economic Hitman, which I read much more recently.

Of these, I think that Guns, Germs and Steel and Chua's World on Fire might be the books that impacted me the most.  I'll blog later about GG&S, but let it suffice to say that it provides an excellent overview about how we got to where we are today -- namely, a globe where certain peoples have managed to suck up all the resources and are thus disproportionately able to control the circulation of global capital. I really can't recommend it highly enough as a sort of baseline reading to coming to understand the current state of globalization (the other thing you should be sure to get in is a strong book on colonialism).

But for today's globalization environment, World On Fire is hands down the single best book at fairly quickly describing the current state of globalization on a number of different fronts: economic, political, and cultural. Almost all the other books we read covered one of these areas (or one sub-portion, or period, of these areas). What Chua does so effectively is to call attention to the intersection of the simultaneous rapid democratization and rapid expansion of capitalism/free markets that is the hallmark of current globalization. She looks closely at a number of countries where this is occuring, and tries to draw attention to where gloablization seems to be working, and where it does not. Her compelling thesis is that in countries where a minority sub-population group holds a decisive economic position over the majority ethnic population, mixing together rapid democratization and free markets is a recipe for social unrest (and economic failure). Her list of examples is convincing: Rwanda, Indonesia, West Africa. I'm not doing the book justice here, but I have to say that I still haven't seen someone bring together these threads in as compelling a way as Chua does.

If you find the economics part of all this intimidating, try watching the film Life and Debt. It lays out the way that western countries (through the IMF and World Bank) effectively and unfairly control the economies of smaller developing countires in ways that seek to create a permanent economic servitude (at the expense of educational, health and other social services).

Africa Reading List:
Some time previously, I set out to read up on Africa, a place I came to realize I knew little about, had never been taught about, and seldom read of in the news.  Reading up on Africa is pretty useful for understanding globalization.

• Things Fall Apart. Achebe.
• King Leopold's Ghost. Adam Hochschild. 1999.
• The Shadow of the Sun. Ryszard Kapusscinski. 2001.
• Tropical Gangsters. Robert Klitgaard. 1990.

I have never been to Africa (well, except for a day in Morocco, which I don't think counts). However, the above 4 books, when combined with a basic political history of the continent (pick any) and Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel I think start to give a pretty interesting overview of the pre-colonial to post-colonial (globalization) period. Africa is not a culturally monolithical place at all, so these books definitely can't even start to describe such a diverse set of peoples, but they do add up to a meaningful start at understanding the West's, ahem, acquisition and subsequent deacquisition and continuing exploitation of the continent, and the mess that has been made of things.

Comments

[nedrarh]

Guns, Germs and Steel has long been on my to read list. Maybe when I finish school ...